The strangeness of nature in three American poets

¶ … American Poets -- the Strangeness of Nature

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening -- Robert Frost

Robert Frost's poem -- an iconic and very well-known poem -- can be misunderstood, and is misunderstood in many instances. This is because there is a seeming innocence about the poem. What could be confusing about a poem that seems so tranquil and so linked to the natural world in wintertime? A careful examination of the second stanza can discover there is more meaning than immediately meets the eye, however.

"My little horse must think it queer / to stop without a farmhouse near / Between the woods and frozen lake / the darkest evening of the year."

The poet stops on the "…darkest evening of the year" to watch the woods "fill up with snow," and according to John T. Ogilvie's scholarship, the poet is caught between two worlds, the world of quiet nature and solitude, and the world of "…people and social obligations"

(Ogilvie, 1959). Does the lure of his social responsibility have more power than his attraction to the woods? Ironically the world of the woods and snow may be the poet's escape from the village and the society, but a man owns these woods so he isn't really escaping at all.

Ogilvie suggests that these lines may seem simple ("He gives his harness bells a shake / to ask if there is some mistake") but when a person is out in the cold winter night and parked between woods and a frozen lake in the snow, the poet may "…succumb to the influences that are at work" -- the "empty wastes of white and black" (Ogilvie, p. 1).

Reuben a. Browner notes that the line "My little horse must think it queer" is designed to remind readers that this is a lonely scene, a "…kind of northern nowhere connected with the strangeness of the winter solstice"

(Browner, 1963). Browner asserts that "The darkest evening of the year" was intended by Frost to pull the reader "into its drowsy current." The critic is correct that there is a kind of drowsy rhythm to the poem, a soft, unhurried Mother Nature kind of peacefulness. Browner adds that the first two lines of the last stanza, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep / but I have promises to keep" are designed by the poet to create a "rocking motion" which prepares the reader for the "hypnosis of the fourth" line: "And miles to go before I sleep / and miles to go before I sleep" (Browner, p. 2).

Meanwhile the late literary critic Richard Poirier believes the Frost poem is "…concerned with ownership and also with someone who cannot be or does not choose to be very emphatic about owning himself"

(Poirier, 1977). Poirier believes that the person the poet has depicted in this poem is "out of character" to be in the woods while it fills up with snow; the reason Poirier believes that is because the horse believes it's "queer" which tells the reader that the man is normally passing through and has business to attend to. "Miles to go before I sleep" indicates to Poirier that this person is a "man of business who has promised his time, his future to other people" (Poirier, p. 3).

Jeffrey Meyers takes a rather controversial position regarding Frost's poem; Meyers suggests that the theme of the poem is "…the temptation of death, even suicide"

(Meyers, 1996). The woods filling up with snow symbolizes death -- and the darkest evening of the year adds to the possibility that the poet is talking about death. The horse instinctively wants to head for home but the poet presents a "drowsy, dream-like" line, "Of easy wind and downy flake," which to Meyers suggests man's subconscious desire to die in those dark, snowy woods. But moving on because there are "miles to go…" means the poet is resisting the temptation to die and let the snow cover his body.

It is interesting to read Carol Frost's recollection of what Robert Frost told a friend, M. Arthur Bleau, about the writing of this poem. Frost had taken some goods into market, hoping to sell them to make some money to buy Christmas presents. He is discouraged because nothing sold and he was coming home empty-handed. When he neared his house, he told Bleau, he stopped in the woods and gave the horse "his head"; then, Frost told Bleau, "I just sat there are bawled like a baby…"

until the tears ran dry (Carol Frost, 2012). After Frost had cried, the horse then "shook its harness and the bells jingled" and while Frost said nothing to the horse, that animal knew it was time to head home. "Love would see the Frost family through that Christmas and the rest of hard times," Carol Frost writes (p. 1).

Desert Places -- Robert Frost

This poem is another involving snow and loneliness and night, but it begins with more urgency, emotion and tension than "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." And the poem also identifies the emotional situation for the poet quicker and more obviously than the previous poem does. Perhaps "oh, fast," is how quickly the poet is aging and feeling that he doesn't have much time left on the planet. "A few weeds," he writes, and "stubble," which also describes a beard that an old many might have and not bother to shave off. This is what the snow will cover and this is the life that will be covered by time as the poet becomes moody and depressed and perhaps contemplates dying. The stubble also indicates that while nature put the field there, man has tended it, raised corn or wheat and now all that is left as the snow hurtles to the ground is the stubble, and a "few weeds," which is a forlorn thought.

The darkness is falling as fast as the snow, with presents a visual conflict for the reader; which will dominate, the dark or the light? So at the very outset there seems a sense of confusion

Basically the poem can be interpreted on one level as a reflection of the poet's sense of isolation, and that mood is conveyed with the lines:

"I am too absent-spirited to count / the loneliness includes me unawares…"

The poet uses irony effectively in the title, conveying a sense of a vast wasteland, covered with snow that makes the scene as desolate as a desert. Humans have to cross though deserts sometimes in their lives, and it is usually a human crisis or fear that sends them across those lonely sands. Critic Adeel Salman, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, explains that the entire second stanza reflects a sense of being "deprived" and hence the poet's mind -- with the loneliness and dispossession wrapped around the scene he envisions -- "gives way to the benumbing mood all around"

(Salman, 2003).

It seems the poet conveys that he is uncomfortable in this setting, he is perhaps an intruder, and while the animals are perfectly comfortable in their places, the poet is out of place and doesn't really blend in with nature. In the third stanza loneliness is linked to a "Blanker whiteness of benighted snow / With no expression, nothing to express," which takes the reader into a bleak moment where perhaps life is meaningless and nature cannot be found.

When the poet's eye turns from the blanker whiteness -- an expressionless moment in a lonely mood in a field filling up with snow -- quickly to the universe and the spaces between stars, a reader could assume the poet is trying to escape the world around him. Or he may be relating that he is lonely and spiritless but he is nonetheless part of the universe. Thinking about the vast distance between stars is a cold and lonely visualization. By saying "they cannot scare me with their empty spaces" the poet would appear to be in denial; perhaps he is scared, even though he is nearly home. The universe, as enormous and infinite as it is, may be a more comfortable place for him to imagine than the cold darkness of the field with snow falling fast. There are always several ways to look at poems, and in this case, a reader might take the gloom of the first three stanzas as a mood that the poet would like to break.

And hence, the fourth stanza is the place in which he lifts himself up beyond the bleakness into the heavens where no human can be found. And suddenly he realizes he is near to his home and it doesn't matter whether he is lonely or scared or in isolation -- home will help him forget all that, and if he needs to continue to be dark and depressed, he can do it just as well at home as he can crossing a snowy field in the darkness.

Tulips -- Sylvia Plath

According to author and professor Jeannine Dobbs, Plath received flowers while in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy in 1961. Apparently Plath wrote the poem during her stay in the hospital, which can be a depressing place notwithstanding all the nurses and orderlies dressed in white. The appendectomy followed a miscarriage that Plath had suffered through, so given those realities in the poet's life -- especially for a woman to lose a child she had been carrying -- one can identify with the bleak nature of the poem. Confronted with the birth that turned out to be death, and then a painful appendectomy, the tulips are used as something of an abstraction and the redness of them gives her pain because it "corresponds" to the wound in her body from the surgery.

The opening stanza's first few lines seem rather peaceful and restful: "The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here / look how white everything is / How quiet, how snowed-in / I am learning peacefulness / lying by myself quietly / as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands…" but by the fourth line in the first stanza, the reader is hit with the truth about this poem, which is that the poet feels like the life has gone out of her and she has turned her clothes "up to the nurses" and her "body to surgeons"; those knife-wielding physicians and the environment she is in let the reader know this poem is going to be very personal and perhaps very depressing.

Anyone who has been in a hospital for any length of time can identify with the lines that compares nurses to birds: "The nurses pass and pass / they are no trouble / they pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps / doing things with their hands / one just the same as another / so it is impossible to tell how many there are." Ocean environments are always places where ubiquitous seagulls sway in the wind and scurry along the sand, and they all look alike, and they are all free.

Meanwhile the tulips "eat my oxygen," the poet writes. She would like to get rid of them the same way she would like to depart from the "trappings of her life and the family she has"

(Dobbs, 1977). Instead of tulips the inference from the poet is that she would prefer death:

"Now I have lost myself / I am sick of baggage / My husband and child smiling out of the family photo / their smiles catch onto my skin / little smiling hooks."

Smiles and hooks don't normally blend together very well; except when a young boy catches a catfish and smiles at his achievement on a summer day with a worm on his hook, a woman in a hospital who has been given flowers to cheer her up doesn't imagine smiling hooks. In fact the tulips have ruined her day. She prefers to be depressed and dark to happy and bright: "The tulips are too red in the first place / they hurt me & #8230; their redness talks to my wound / it corresponds / they are subtle / they seem to float / though they weigh me down."

Margaret Dickie explains that Tulips is certainly not cheerful, but it moves from "cold to warmth, from numbness to love, from empty whiteness to vivid redness," and this is done through "associative imagination" (Dickie, 1979). What Dickie is alluding to is the last stanza of the poem, in which Plath admits that despite the negative images and thoughts of the preceding stanzas of the poem, the walls "…seem to be warming themselves" and like the tulips, the poets' heart opens and closes and there is a sense that the tulips have bloomed "…out of sheer love for me." A woman in such desperate straits needs love, and the last two lines take Plath away to the sea, a peaceful thought, albeit her health is not what it should be.

Is this poem designed to be a criticism of the hospital environment? No, although it certainly comes out that way in passages. The problem is health, and the heart is numbed and made bitter -- in contrast to the cheery red tulips -- and the heart wants a chance to experience that darkness without being intruded upon by all the trappings of the hospital and its nurses, who are too many to count.

Critic Barbara Hardy believes that the poet gradually accepts the tulips, a process which symbolizes the poet (and patient) as being able to reluctantly accept a return to life. "The flowers really do move toward the light…do take up oxygen… [and are] inhabitants of the bizarre world of private irrational fantasy"

(Hardy, 1970). The poet is perhaps actually hallucinating at the beginning of the poem, Hardy comments, since the poet's head has been propped up (by the nurses) on the pillow is like "an eye between two white lids that will not shut"; and those nurses may be too many to count but they bring the poet sleep "…in their bright needles."

Why does the poet insist that the tulips should be "…behind bars like dangerous animals"? Perhaps it is that the speaker's frustration with the loss of a baby and a subsequent surgery leads her to see the bright red tulips as an intrusion into her white world, and therefore dangerous.

Mushrooms -- Sylvia Plath

The first image that comes to mind when reading carefully through Plath's "Mushrooms" is that the mushrooms could represent the group in society that is hidden from the eyes of the majority. It could be the low income, hardy folks that "Nobody sees…" and are nothing more than "small grains" in the sand of society. Not only are they not seen, they do not hear and do not see: "Our hammers, our rams / Earless and eyeless / perfectly voiceless."

If this is indeed the reader believes that the stealth theme of "Mushrooms" is about the unseen, unheard lower belly of society, then the following lines fit in very well to that threat of thought:

"We…diet on water / on crumbs of shadow / bland-mannered, asking / little or nothing / So many of us! / So many of us!"

The other path this poem may be metaphorically taking is the theme of feminism, and how women are often pushed into the shadows of the power structure. "We are shelves / we are tables / we are meek / we are edible." The second line in the poem would seem to be an embrace of the feminine side of life -- "Whitely" is a very womanly image, given that women have acquired a kind of purity, virtue and even innocence when juxtaposed with the hard-core man in the society.

The accuracy of linking women that are ignored and have little voice -- and lower income people that are also not heard -- with the growth of mushrooms is near genius, if that is what she was creating. Whether or not Plath is pointing to those sub-cultures in society, a reader can let his or her imagination run in those directions. For the feminist, "We shall by morning / inherit the earth / Our foot's in the door" is a proud and bold prediction for a future that is far more fulfilling than the present.

Certainly an alert reader can recognize that the line about the meek, and how they "shall inherit the earth" is one of the Beatitudes, and hence Plath brings the Holy Bible into the picture; and whether she is alluding poetically to the marginalized poor people or the still not liberated female gender, the ending is very hopeful, and rebellious too. "Nudgers and shovers / in spite of ourselves" seems to be saying, we are not built to move mountains or push our way into positions of authority, but that day is coming when we will have a larger role in the world.

What could be more ready for fertility than a woman ovulating -- waiting to give birth and to "Take hold on the loam"? When thinking of how mushrooms are grown, in "leafy bedding" and "shoulder through holes," those images could relate to the feminine gender. Is that too radical a viewpoint? There is another image in this poem that could be considered as a possible metaphor and that is the cloud that forms after an atomic weapon is exploded is mushroom shaped.

Given that Plath committed suicide in 1963, and that she was depressed during the last years of her life -- and carried the scars that resulted from her husband's infidelity -- one can speculate as to what she really meant by mushrooms. And in conclusion, having one's foot in the door doesn't mean that the door has opened by any means. Many groups and cultures have had a foot in the door but never were able to pass through. Still, Jesus Christ said that the meek would inherit the earth, so, "in spite of ourselves" and in a world where "our kind multiplies," if the reader can take those lines to be women speaking out, this is a positive poem from a woman who would later take her own life because perhaps she never found her way into that door.

Dover Beach -- Matthew Arnold

T.S. Eliot is truly one of the giants of literature, and besides his elite standing as a poet and writer, he was also a critic, according to Herman Rapaport. Among the interesting and poetically appropriate phrases Eliot coined was "objective correlative," by which he meant that any object, situation or event that functions as "…an adequate correlative to the poet's emotions" is an objective correlative